Dr. Kathryn (Katy) Huff

Dr. Kathryn Huff is an Associate Professor in the Department of Nuclear, Plasma, and Radiological Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She served as the Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Energy within the Department of Energy (DOE) from 2021 to 2024. Before joining UIUC, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow with both the Nuclear Science and Security Consortium and the Berkeley Institute for Data Science at the University of California - Berkeley. As a PhD student, she helped to reimagine the GENIUSv2 fuel cycle simulator and became the primary developer of the Cyclus simulator in its initial phase. In addition, she collaborated with the Systems Analysis group at Idaho National Laboratory to develop the Fuel Cycle Simulator Software Requirements that defined the goals and expectations for the Next Generation Fuel Cycle Simulator. She received her PhD in Nuclear Engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2013. Her undergraduate degree was in Physics from the University of Chicago.